Stephanie writes young adult contemporary novels and is the creator of GoTeenWriters.com. Her novels include The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt series (Revell) and The Revised Life of Ellie Sweet (Playlist). You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and check out samples of her work on her author website.
After spending most of last week at a teen writers conference here in Kansas City (The One Year Adventure Novel summer workshop) I'm attempting to plug back into the real world. Like where people ask me to get them juice instead of to sign their shirt.
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| Jill signing body parts after her wildly successful "World Building" class |
Jill and I had a fun time connecting with several writers we know through Go Teen Writers, like Ellana Turrell and Leah Good. And we met lots of new writers who are full of passion and talent and love for Doctor Who.
While we were away from the blog, there was a word war going on! Thirty-four writers banded together and wrote an amazing 333,329 words last week. How awesome is that? It was fun to see how you all encouraged each other.
The most prolific writers last week were:
Grace S. with 63,452 words
Alyson Dow with 31,027 words
and Layla H. with 30, 103 words
These girls won their choice of a free download of Go Teen Writers: How to Turn Your First Draft into a Published Book, a free download of The Revised Life of Ellie Sweet, or a copy of Captives by Jill Williamson. Congratulations! We'll have to have another word war this summer, for sure.
WOW! That is a LOT of words! Sarah, you're an outstanding estimator! Grace, Alyson, and Layla--that is a seriously AMAZING amount of words!! :O
ReplyDeleteThis was so much fun :D
Oh thanks. I was a little off, but not by much. 63,000 word in FIVE days? That breaks down to 12.5K every day. That's more than I wrote all week! I am very seriously impressed.
DeleteThanks Stephanie! Because of the word war, I'm only a day or two away from finishing my novel.
~Sarah Faulkner
If only someone had written FOUR MORE WORDS. That would've been seriously awesome. xD
DeleteThat's awesome, Sarah!
Delete63,452 as the top word count, wauw! Congratulations all three :D And an amazing total overal!
ReplyDeleteCongrats everyone! I had just finished my book and was so busy with editing that I didn't have the time to do the ww : (
ReplyDeleteWhat, what? That's like NaNo in one week! Amazing! Sadly, I typed 0 words last week... Congrats, you guys!
ReplyDeleteAnd we met Adrienne too! I have a picture of her in her fabulous Princess Leia dress, but I forgot my SD card and can't upload my pics till I get home and can find the cord. :-/
I miss OYAN... I miss seeing people in cool costumes with Doctor Who hash marks on their arms... *sigh*
That's about how many words I typed, Jill :)
DeleteI couldn't remember if she was a Go Teen Writers person or not. Didn't mean to leave her off the list!
Wow wow wow wow!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteCongratulations guys!!!!!!!!!!!
Everyone did such a great job and - hyperventilates - some of these speeds that people can type at are amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :-)
Welldone!!
-Koren
A writer for Him. :-)
That's insane. Five days. That makes me feel better about the 11k I have to write to finish my WIP, I guess.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for hosting this!
And OYAN sounds like a lot of fun. If only I were homeschooled. :)
It WAS fun, Katia. There were one or two teens there who are in public or private schools and do this in addition to their regular course load. I found that impressive!
DeleteThank you so much, Stephanie and Mrs. Williamson, for hosting this word war!! I had so much fun, and got way more writing done than I ever have before, with hopes to keep it up, lol. ;o) And I'd like to participate in another one!!!!
ReplyDeleteCONGRATULATIONS to Grace, Alyson, and Layla!!!!!!! I am super impressed with how much you all wrote!!!
And congrats to everyone else who participated in this!!!
P.S. This week, some things I kept in mind was Stephanie's posts about writing a bad first draft (that thought process basically changed my writing life), and your "Bird by Bird" post. New favorite phrase right there! And Mrs. Williamson, your post on sentence structure and keeping actions and reactions logical definitely stretched me as a writer this week. Not saying I have it all figured out yet, but it's been nice to work on. :) I would be a much, much different writer without Go Teen Writers. So thank you. :)
Agreed, Whitney. "Bad first drafts" made my life a million times easier, probably. Until editing rolls around of course. ;) GTW has been soooo helpful!
DeleteOh, I'm so glad, Whitney!
DeleteI just finished my novel today, thanks to this Word War! Thank you so much for organizing it.
ReplyDeleteThat's awesome!! So exciting!!! :D
DeleteYAY ZARA!! :D
DeleteYay! So exciting!
DeleteZara! Congratulations!
DeleteWooohooo!
DeleteEeeeeep!!!!!! :-)
Delete-Koren
A writer for Him. :-)
Those are amazing counts! Great job.
ReplyDeleteOh my God!!!! You guys wrote sooooo much! You're all amazing. Congrats to all who participated! :)
ReplyDeleteWow, Grace! How did you get so many words in (I thought that I wrote a lot until I saw that 60,000 on my screen) in that amount of time? Either you have a lot of discipline (I kept telling myself to not check my word count every five minutes), lighting fast fingers, or just a lot of time. Possibly all three combined. What's your secret!?
ReplyDeleteI know, right?! Like Mrs. Williamson said...that's NaNo in a WEEK!
DeleteYou DID do a lot, Alyson :)
DeleteI planned the story out before I started, so it wasn't that hard to get all the words down, and I'm on summer vacation, so I had a lot of free time.
DeleteO_o 63K? Good night! How'd you do that, Grace S.?
ReplyDeleteCongratulations to Grace, Alyson, and Leyla!
GUYS I have concluded that Grace is a robot. A WORD ROBOT WITH NINJA POWERS WOO!
DeleteCan someone explain 'honour system' to me please? Because it said the results would be like that ...I think... And I thought they'd be in a list in ascending order :P
Anyway, well done to everyone! :D
The honor system just means that Ms. Morrill is trusting us to submit our real word count, not some made up number. :)
Delete"A WORD ROBOT WITH NINJA POWERS!!!"--that made me laugh, Rose. xD
Yes, it was completely honor system. Except the top three word counts had to submit their documents to me so I could verify. Though, of course, they could have written them years ago or over the course of a few weeks rather than just last week. So there's still some trust required :)
DeleteOh, I understand. Cool! :)
DeleteYay! I can't wait for you to do another word war this summer. I didn't participate in this one, but I hopefully can next time!
ReplyDeleteCongratulations to Grace, Alyson, and Layla! Everyone accomplished so much. I can't wait for the next word war!
ReplyDeleteI was going to post my own comment, but Jill said almost exactly what I was going to. I second her.
DeleteAnd Grace, how...? I think you may have set a record.